Dag Gadol

Here’s a dilemma which I think a lot of modern liberal Jews have to face whenever we go to the Torah looking for wisdom: On the one hand, we find these beautiful, life-changing values of community, justice and faith in God that really speak to us on a fundamental level. On the other hand, we find these values situated within the framework of an ancient culture whose fundamental assumptions are often radically different from our own. In the best of times this can be challenging as we work to understand just what the text is saying in its own context, and what it could mean in our own. But sometimes it can be profoundly alienating, especially when those cultural assumptions run so profoundly counter to our own values that the message gets completely lost in translations.

I think most of us have some of these “sticking points” – themes or ideas in the Torah that profoundly unsettle us. They’re a natural consequence of living our lives in more than one civilization, or as philosopher Jeffrey Stout would put it, speaking more than one “moral language” fluently. Whenever we encounter one of these sticking points, it forces us to stop and wrestle mightily with the text. In this struggle we sometimes come out on top, emerging with some fresh insight to lead us on our way. Sometimes, however, it is all too much for us and we are forced to come to terms with the fact that even in our most sacred texts there are elements which simply defy our efforts to derive meaning from them.

I’m sure everyone’s sticking points are different, but for me one of the major ones comes up at the beginning of Parashat Shelach-Lecha, in which Moses sends out twelve spies to scout out the land and its people. There is certainly a lot to be learned from this story – lessons about courage, loyalty and the importance of not selling ourselves short. One of my favorite takes on the story, to be found in Midrash Rabah, imagines the spies in dialogue with God:

“And we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves,” the spies say, recalling the gigantic stature of the inhabitants of the land. The Holy Blessed One said: [This point] I would concede to you, except that you then said, “And so we appeared to them!” Do you claim to know how I made you look in their sight? Who can say that I didn’t make you appear as angels to them? (Num. Rabah 16:11)

There is certainly much that is beautiful and true that we can learn from this teaching, but every time I come to read this passage I stumble over a single, unavoidable fact that often tends to be glossed over – that the fundamental purpose of the mission being carried out by Joshua and Caleb and the ten other men is to spy out the land in preparation for invading it and slaughtering its inhabitants, men, women and children.

This legacy of violence and ethnic conflict is often celebrated or simply taken for granted in the tradition, at least as long as it’s the Israelites who are inflicting the violence. As someone who grew up in a world haunted by the specter of ethnic violence – in Bosnia, in Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Israel/Palestine and my own home, the United States – this aspect of the Torah’s worldview is a major sticking point for me, a stumbling block I just keep tripping over each time I return to the text.

While I was thinking about this, I happened to come across a teaching in Me’Or Einaim, a Torah commentary by Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl. In his discussion of this parsha, the Chernobyler Rebbe addresses the complicated relationship between knowledge and choice. God, whose knowledge of the universe is perfect and incontrovertible, is aware from before the beginning of creation what every decision and its outcome will be. And yet, as humans, we have the freedom to decide what to do and to choose between right and wrong. How can this be?

Drawing upon the tradition of Lurianic mysticism, the Rebbe tells a story of how before the creation of this world God created many worlds but destroyed them all, finding each one in turn to be unsatisfactory. But the shards of those rejected worlds didn’t simply vanish. They remained, mixed together with the stuff of this world. Thus, our world and everything in it is a mixture of good and evil, and our task as humans is to choose the good, sifting through the discarded shards of might-have-beens to find the sparks of divine light concealed within.

The sin of the spies, explains the Rebbe, was not that they observed something negative about the land God had promised to the Israelites. It was that , seeing the bad things mixed in with the good, they essentially washed their hands of the whole affair, rejecting it entirely, and forgetting that our critical task as Jews and as human beings is to sift through the bad in order to find the good.

Reading this, I found myself asking: If this is so for the ten spies, then why not also for me, the reader? Perhaps all these stumbling blocks and sticking points are there for a reason – because our task, as readers as in life, is to search through the shards of a broken world in search of meaning.

For me – and, I imagine, a lot of other trans women out there – the recent flurry of media attention around the appearance of Caitlyn Jenner in Vanity Fair has given rise to a whole complicated array of feelings, not the least of which may be longing for a time when everybody will finally stop talking about Caitlyn Jenner.

Partially, this is due to the way in which the discussion of Jenner’s transition in the media serves as a constant reminder of the painful dilemma which every trans woman with the audacity to want to live and be recognized as the gender she feels herself to be faces every day of her life: If she doesn’t “pass” – which is to say, essentially, if she doesn’t manage to live up to this society’s incredibly narrow and unforgiving standards of female attractiveness and feminine behavior enough to fly under the radar of those who would evaluate and pass judgment upon her femininity – then she is in constant danger of rejection, public scorn and even physical violence every time she walks out her front door. On the other hand, if she dresses or behaves in a way that comes across as too “stereotypically feminine,” or if she appears to take pleasure in any aspect of looking, acting or dressing in a feminine manner, then she opens herself to rejection and ridicule of another kind, this often coming from self-described feminists who, frankly, ought to know better.

If this dilemma sounds awfully familiar to cisgender women who at some point in their lives have had to deal with similar issues around body image and the toxic double standards of a society in which it is often just as unacceptable for women to be “too feminine” as it is for them to be “not feminine enough,” then it ought to give one pause, given that one of the many accusations which trans women find ourselves saddled with on a regular basis is precisely that we will never “count” as “real women” because we lack the “experiences” and “socialization” which constitute authentic female identity. Leaving aside the sheer blindness to cultural, racial, medical, economic and class differences inherent in the claim that that there is one unifying set of experiences which unambiguously establish one’s status as a woman, it is a source of constant amazement to me how comfortable certain people feel in making claims about the lived experience of others – especially when these claims are leveled for the purpose of invalidating the identities of an already marginalized group of people.

Frankly, I am tired of the debate about how to define womanhood – the standards in this debate are simply too prone to shift at a moment’s notice in any way necessary to support the preconceived notions of those for whom the invalidity of my identity is a foregone conclusion. Is it any wonder that trans people, faced with the constant, overwhelming pressure to justify themselves to a world which isn’t willing to accept them on any account, sometimes have recourse to simplistic explanations involving the brain or the notion of having been “born in the wrong body?”

The simple truth of the matter is that gender identity is an incredibly complicated phenomenon whose origins and nature have never been satisfactorily explained. Is gender physical? Neuro-chemical? Psychological? Cultural? Legal? Does it have its origins in our anatomy or our life experiences or in some mysterious realm of the spirit? If we are being truly honest with ourselves, the answer to all of these questions is an unqualified “maybe.” We simply don’t have the language to deal with something as complicated as identity with any degree of comprehensiveness. About the only concept that truly does it justice to gender identity is one which has sadly fallen out of favor in our hyper-materialist, over-medicalized society: the soul. It used to be that “a soul” was synonymous with “a person,” and the nature of a person’s soul was a deep, inner mystery shared between that person and the divine source from which it flowed. To presume to know another person’s soul required an incredible amount of time, patience and intimate closeness. In our efforts to reduce everything in the world to that which it is possible to analyze and critique in the space of an online journal article, I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something along the way, something that would be tremendously useful in understanding gender.

In the absence of a clear understanding of everything that goes into making us who we are, all that I and people like me can do in the face of an unsympathetic world is to assert our experience – not some abstract, essentialist version of a unifying “male” or “female” experience, but the messy, concrete, lived experience of real people who know who we are, even if we can’t always show you the math of that equation in a way that would make sense to anyone but ourselves. And really, isn’t this inability to fully articulate the mystery of ourselves just another example of an experience with which all of us, no matter what our identity, can identify?

One of the issues Jews have been struggling to deal with since the dawn of the modern age is how to reconcile traditional Jewish teachings about chosenness with the Enlightenment ideals of equality and universalism. Since time immemorial Jews understood themselves to enjoy a unique relationship with God, based on the covenant established between God and the Jewish people. This point of view was all well and good in a time when religious claims to exclusivity were quite common and the disagreement tended not to be about whether chosenness made sense as a religious concept but about which religious community, the Jews or the Christians, were the true chosen people of God. As the Enlightenment dawned, however, a new set of ideas began to enter onto the European scene – ideas of pluralism and religious tolerance, of ethical values based on reason alone rather than revelation – and these ideas soon became so widespread that they could not help but have an impact on the Jewish community.

The dilemma faced by Jews was this: The Enlightenment values of universalism and tolerance seemed to hold out the possibility, virtually unimaginable in the pre-modern world, that Jews could be accepted into the wider European society and recognized as citizens on an equal footing with their non-Jewish neighbors. On the other hand, these ideals were difficult to reconcile with the idea that the Jews were a special people chosen by God to bear witness to the Torah and live in accordance with its laws. If we were a chosen people, then what about all the other people who weren’t chosen? So long as Jews l tended to live in largely self-regulating communities made up exclusively of other Jews, these questions didn’t seem particularly pressing. Once Jews began to enter into the broader society, to study, live and work alongside non-Jews, they became much more immediate and perplexing.

I won’t go into the history of the debate. Suffice it to say that a number of solutions have been proposed to this dilemma, but that it remains a relevant issue in our own time. It is certainly possible to say, in accordance with traditional Reconstructionist thinking, that the idea of chosenness has outlived its usefulness. And yet, in the absence of chosenness, we are left with the tricky question of why it is that we continue to practice Judaism. Is it really enough to say that Judaism is the religion of our ancestors, and that this in itself carries with it a certain kind of obligation? This position is hard to maintain in the modern world, especially in a society like that of the United States in which so many individuals change religious affiliations at least once in their lives. Furthermore, it does not address the experiences of Jewish converts, of whom there are a growing number, who elect to cast their lot with the Jewish people. As a Jew-by-choice with no known familial connection to Judaism, it is hard to frame my decision to convert in terms of “heritage” and “peoplehood.” These have become factors in my life, of course, but they were not there from the start. Something else was required to bring me through the doors of that Oklahoma synagogue back in the winter of 2007.

That “something else” is difficult to define, but one way of describing it might be “spiritual learning style.” The idea that students have different learning styles is now widely accepted in the world of education. For example, a student who learns visually may pick up a lot more from a helpful diagram than they ever could from reading a chapter in a book. I believe that these pedagogical learning styles have their parallels in the spiritual world as well. People, by virtue of some combination of natural inclination and upbringing, tend to be more inclined to connect spiritually in some ways than in others. Furthermore, just as some teachers tend to be better at engaging with certain learning styles than others, so too some religious traditions are better at engaging certain spiritual “types” than others. That these spiritual learning styles are at least partially learned is clear from the fact that so many people throughout history have tended to remain within the religious tradition of their birth. That they also have deep underpinnings in the psychological and even biological temperament of the individual is shown by the fact that there are so many individuals who, following their own mysterious inner calling, abandon the tradition they were raised in for a new one.

This language of “spiritual learning styles” is a helpful way for me to frame the ways in which I do and do not feel “chosen” as a Jew. As a child of the modern world, it is impossible for me to identify with the idea of chosenness as it has traditionally been understood. In my life I have encountered many different people from diverse religious backgrounds and found that each had their own invaluable Torah to share. It simply doesn’t make sense to me to try and establish a hierarchy when it comes to all these people’s relationships with God. At the same time, however, it is impossible to deny that the Torah of my adopted people calls out to my being in a way that feels uniquely right for me. In this way, I can say that while I do not feel that Jews or Judaism are uniquely chosen, I do feel strongly that I am uniquely chosen to be Jewish, as are all those others, converts and non-converts, with whom I share this community.

As all around this country some of us are preparing to stuff ourselves silly in honor of Thanksgiving, while others are heading out into the snowy streets once again, putting themselves in harm’s way to protest in support of the fairly simple idea that a police officer should not be able to gun a person down in the street simply because he is black. Meanwhile, I feel the need to talk a little bit about faith.

People talk about faith as if it means the same thing as belief. When someone tells you something which you have no independent way of verifying, you either believe them or you don’t, or else you choose to suspend belief until such time as more evidence comes along. Who we choose to believe, and for what reasons, is a desperately important question in a time when it is becoming clear that the testimony of any number of eyewitnesses isn’t enough to get a single police officer indicted so long as the they are black. Nevertheless, this question has very little to do with faith, because faith (אמונה) isn’t about belief, it’s about commitment to the truth we’ve witnessed with our own eyes.

Faith isn’t what happens when someone tells you something and you accept it as true without checking first. It’s what happens when you have an experience – a big, important experience – and the value of that experience is so high that you can’t simply let it go, even when you’re told to do just that. Instead you take it and hold on to it, enshrine it in your heart so it will be there with you throughout your life, a little flame of truth to be cherished and nourished with all your being despite the best efforts of the world to blow it out.

To have faith is to remain true – to your convictions, but also, to the authenticity of your own experience. It is no coincidence that in Jewish tradition Satan (or more accurately, the satan) is represented as a prosecuting attourney. For the role of the satan is precisely to challenge that fundamental faith in the importance and validity of our most important experiences. In the bible, as well as numerous Jewish texts, the satan is depicted sometimes as challenging the faith of humans in the goodness and power of G-d, but more often as challenging the faith of G-d in the goodness and worth of humanity, asking both us and G-d the pointed questions that, in our most vulnerable moments, may tempt us to go back on our word and deny the evidence of our own senses. It’s not a term of moral censure, it’s a job description. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t our job to do our best not to listen to what he says.

This is why faith demands the deepest and fullest commitment to our own perceptions, feelings and intuition. The position of faith is to reject the overwhelming flow of received narratives broadcast by the powerful and repeated by the morally lazy, to stand firm in the midst of the flood and say – that’s not how I see it. And that’s why I’m praying on this Thanksgiving day for you who are going out into the streets to defend yourselves and your communities from the authorities who seem determined to dehumanize you, that you be blessed with the faith you need to continue speaking your truth louder than the voices of the people whose job it is to shut you up. And for the rest of us, citizens of a nation that has so often broken faith with its communities of color, may we be willing to listen, and listen hard, to what they are saying.

Oh You my Love,
You whom our fear of love
And brutal callousness reduce
To a “God of the gaps,”
We need you now
Need perhaps those very gaps
So much more than ever

You whom we praise
For separating dark from light
The ground from water
The holy from the workaday
Can You not cleave us from ourselves
A little bit
A gap, a space
Enough to see
Just where our insides
Are taking us?

A gap, oh please,
My Love, between
Our origins and our actions
Between the angry churning
Of our bellies and
The workings of our minds
A gap between the words we say
And the ears of those we speak against
A gap between our better selves
And the evil urge
Between every bomb, every blade,
Every bullet, brick and rocket
And its intended target
Between our suffering
And the death of compassion

And if we somehow find our way
Through this madness that we’ve made
Of this, Your good Earth
Then we’ll see you on the other side
Of the gap

The young man at the security desk scurried off to consult with his superior, leaving my travelling companion and I looking at each other across our massive pile of luggage as if to say, “Well, here it comes.” There’s a certain sense of inevitability that follows you when you’re travelling as a transgender person, the understanding that if this checkpoint goes smoothly, there’s always the next … and the next. Travelling long distances is disorienting for anyone, but for me it isn’t simply a matter of the time zones separating my destination from my point of origin, but of what I have come to think of as gender zones – those ill-defined fields of perception and official recognition within which my social gender is liable to fluctuate wildly in ways I can neither predict nor clearly perceive.

Gender zones are a fact of my existence. I move through them constantly every moment of my life. No matter where I am or who I am with, I’m never entirely sure how I’m being perceived. Nevertheless, there are some times in my life when the feeling is more intense. These are moments (going through security while preparing to board an international flight, for example) when the need to present identification or provide an official account of myself forces a breach in the barrier between all my different selves — the public and the private, the internal and the external, who I am for myself, and who I am in the eyes of others, particularly strangers. Under the gaze of officialdom the waveform collapses and all the complexities of my identity are forced, however incoherently, to speak in one voice.

“Is something wrong?” I asked the rather beautiful woman in a severe ponytail and an airport security uniform who was walking in my direction with a look of mild concern on her face.

“There is a question about your passport,” she said a bit hesitantly, fumbling for the words in English with which to politely articulate the problem. I doubt I could ever have explained to her how much the effort meant to me, but she needn’t have bothered. I knew without looking what part of the page she was pointing to. “It says here…”

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep as much of the fatigue and exasperation from my voice as possible. I’d already been waiting at the airport for several hours to be able to check in. “I’m transgender. I consider myself to be a woman but my passport still says I’m male. I haven’t been able to get my documents changed yet.”

“Oh,” she appeared to consider this for a second. “Alright. Did you pack your bags yourself? Are you sure someone didn’t maybe give you something to hold for him? …”

The usual round of repetitive security questions finished, we moved on to get in line to get our boarding passes. I was craning my neck to see how many more people were in line ahead of us when a voice called out behind me.

“Ladies?”

At first it didn’t occur to me that we were the ones being called to. When I turned around it was the same woman from security. “I will give you the name of my superior. When you go through the baggage check, ask for her so that you will not have to explain about these things again.”

There’s a certain sense of inevitability that follows you when you’re travelling as a transgender person, the understanding that if this checkpoint goes smoothly, there’s always the next … and the next. But sometimes, at this one, something happens — something you can take with you, to help face all the checkpoints to come.

Once upon a time everything was one, vast body of water, flowing and surging with the wild energy of creation and destruction. Because there was nothing to hold anything apart from the mass, everything that came to be would cease to be as soon as it emerged. Or, because there was nothing separating one thing from another, nothing could be perceived for what it was. This state of matter without form, of being without existence, is called תהו ובהו (tohu va-vohu).

Then something happened –we could call that something “God”– and light became separated from darkness. In the light of this primal separation the waters became separated, one above and one below. Because separation implies difference, the two waters took on different characteristics, hitherto joined together, but now held apart. The great water above retained the character of light and nourishment, while the great water below retained the character of darkness and creation, and in between them the expanse of heaven.

Floating on the waters below is the land. It came into being when the waters below drew back, forming a place where they were *not*, and the land retains this character of negativity — it is watered by the moisture welling up from below, but it can continue to exist only so long as the waters below continue *not* to be where it *is*. At the same time, we and everything else that lives cannot exist without the flow of nourishing rain from the waters above, but if the expanse of heaven were to open up without restraint we would all be flooded into oblivion. Thus, we are all doubly dependent — and doubly threatened — on the waters that bracket our lives, forming and sustaning the space within which we are able to live.

Viewed in a certain way, God is the principle of the harmonious relationship that makes this precarious existence possible. Viewed in another way, God is the One who desires and mandates that this harmony should come into being. Either way, our task in this world is to build a house for God, a site wherein this harmony can be actualized. This site is the Temple. The Temple is built on a mountain — the meeting point between the earth and the heavens — and its foundations sink all the way down into the deepest waters below. Thus, while existing within the space we know and inhabit, it transcends this space, connecting us with what is above and below and knitting all three together into a whole that can only be described as Divine.

So long as the Temple is kept whole and free of defilement, the waters of heaven nourish us and the waters below the earth sustain us without overrunning their respective boundaries. If this divine channel is allowed to fall into disrepair, however, the balance is upset and we find ourselves at the mercy of a world whose forces we can neither predict or control.

This is one version of how the biblical authors imagined the world, but it can also be a way to think about ourselves and our relationship to the mysterious forces that shape our souls and give us the energy we need to be happy, healthy, spiritually awake human beings. Just like my ancient ancestors, I find myself standing on a ground that is really just a thin boundary separating everything I call “me” from what lies beyond. This “beyond” goes both ways. Internally, it is the complex muddle of emotions, dreams, spiritual insights and unconcious mental states that underly and inform my conscious self without being fully “of” it. Externally, it is the world in which I am bound up in a network of relationships that define my identity in ways I can influence but not necessarily control. Somewhere in between these two beyonds is where I have to build my Temple, working to establish a point of balance where I can be nourished and sustained without being utterly overwhelmed. This is the fundamental task of spiritual life.

The first parsha of Shemot ends on a down note. Moses has done exactly what God asked of him, and yet everything seems to have turned out wrong. Rather than listening to Moses and letting Israel go free, the Pharaoh has only been irritated enough to inflict further hardships on them. Meanwhile, the people Moses was sent to save now look on him as the source of their problems rather than the solution. Moses’ feelings about his mission at this stage can best be summed up by the anguished cry he calls out to God – “Oh Lord, why did you bring harm on this people? Why did you send me?”

The despair felt by both Moses and the Israelites at this point is not difficult to understand, inexperienced as they all are with the task they have been called to undertake, which is nothing less than working to bring an end to their own oppression and subjugation. Caught up in the idealism of his mission and still not used to thinking of himself as a leader (or even an Israelite for that matter), there are still a few lessons Moses has to learn before he can lead his people out of slavery and into freedom. It is precisely in this parsha (Parashat Vaera) in which God begins to see to it that he learns them.

Lesson 1: Everything is a process. Everything.

Moses and the Israelites are discouraged at the beginning of the parsha because they all at some level expected the experience of liberation to be simple, easily attained and above all quick. When carrying out God’s first set of instructions did not immediately lead to an improvement of their situation but, to the contrary, seemed to worsen them, Moses and crew reacted with justified surprise. After all, with God on their side, how can they possibly fail? What they fail to understand is that even for God (maybe especially for God) everything is a process. It took seven days for God to create the world, and it’s going to take some time to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. We might ask, if God knew beforehand that in the end it would take the death of the firstborn to get Pharaoh to finally capitulate, why then not try that first and have done with it? It may be, however, that without all the other plagues, the threats and back-and-forth between Moses and Pharaoh, this final plague would not have had the same impact and might not have succeeded at all. All the previous efforts Moses, Aaron go through, apparently futile on the surface, actually prepare the ground for the final victory.

Lesson 2: To make change happen, you first have to believe change is possible.

At this low point, when Moses is feeling so lost and dejected, God prefaces the next set of instructions by recounting all the signs and promises made to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – that the Israelites would be redeemed from exile and would come at last to inherit the land promised to their ancestors. Not only this, however: In this speech God emphasizes that even Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who merited to receive such promises, knew God only as El Shaddai, not by the four-letter name that most closely and intimately connects God with the people Israel. In this way, God seems to be saying: As close as I was to your ancestors, I never revealed My own special name to them, and yet I sheltered and cared for them in times of trouble. How then can I fail to take care of you, who have been permitted to be so much closer to Me?

Lesson 3: When things are looking bad, it’s important to remember who you are and where you came from.

Even after being reminded of God’s promises, Moses still doesn’t feel confident in the eventual success of his mission. The source of this lack of confidence seems to come primarily from a breakdown of trust between the people and its leader. The Torah clearly tells us that the Israelites’ reason for not listening to Moses at this point is because of their circumstances – the harshness of their labor and the constriction of their spirit – nevertheless Moses himself can’t help but attribute his failure to the inadequacy of his leadership skills, regretting once more his deficiency of speech.

It is no coincidence that the Torah chooses this moment to recount in part the genealogy that led up to the birth of Aaron and Moses. This is to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt the close connection between the two brothers, and between Moses and the Israelites. In this way God seems to be saying: Though you were raised in different households and under very different circumstances, still you are brothers and nothing can break that bond. Just the same, though the Israelites may have lost their confidence in you for the moment, you are bound together by ties that cannot be broken. Now get up and get to work!

These are only a few of the lessons Moses needs to learn as we watch him develop! over the course of the next several parshiyot from an insecure outsider suffering from lack of confidence and a very really difficulty connecting with the people he’s supposed to save, into a strong and capable leader able to face down Pharaoh, discontented Israelites and even God in order to protect the people from harm and bring them through the wilderness. May we all learn from them as well as we work to find solutions to the difficulties facing our own communities and in our own days.

I’ve been thinking a lot about space recently: About the ways it shapes our lives, about the ways access to space is granted or denied. Space is one of those things — like any form of privilege really — that you don’t really tend to notice unless you’ve experienced for yourself what it’s like to have the right to the space you need to live challenged or taken away. The country where I live has a lot to say on the subject of space, of who belongs where, and why. I suspect that no matter where you live, you could say the same.

What really got me thinking about the subject of space was all the work we’ve been doing at JCUA this summer around immigration reform. During the course of my time working for Or Tzedek, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a number of brilliant, passionate activists working for immigrants’ rights and to hear their stories and the stories of many others who have been impacted by the utterly shameful mess that is the United States’ immigration system. Listening to all these stories, it has sometimes been surprising how familiar they seem. The experience of living your life in limbo, of occupying a space that doesn’t officially “belong” to you for reasons too complex and personal to be understood by those who are deeply uncomfortable with your presence — this is something that speaks to the core of my own experience and motivates me to be an ally for undocumented immigrants in their struggle for recognition.

There’s a blessing I say regularly, twice each day, when I am taking the hormones that are slowly working to make my body feel more like home. I believe it was originally composed by Elliot Kukla, and it goes like this:

ברוך אתה יי אלקינו מלך העולם המעביר לעוברים

Blessed are you our God, ruler of the universe, who brings across those who cross over.

There is a lot packed into this one, deceptively simple, little sentence. For starters, there is the terminology it uses to refer to transitioning and to those who transition. עבר in Hebrew is a verbal root meaning “to cross.” Its associations in Judaism are complex: On the one hand, it can carry the sense of “crossing over a moral boundary line,” as for example in עבירה — “transgression.” On the other hand, the idea of “crossing over” is fundamental to the Jewish concept of redemption. The two great redemptive moments in the Hebrew Bible — being taken out of slavery in Egypt and being brought into the land of Cana’an — both involve the symbolically powerful act of crossing over a boundary represented by a body of water.

In using עבר to refer to a transgender person’s move to transition toward living the gender they identify as, Kukla seems to be making a rather radical statement about the place of trans experience in Judaism — removing it from עבירה, the rejected periphery of transgressive behavior, and placing it right smack dab in the redemptive center of the Jewish tradition. Margaret Moers Wenig, in her article “Spiritual Lessons I Have Learned From Transsexuals” (in Balancing on the Mechitza), goes even further perhaps when she attempts to determine a proper Jewish term for “transsexual” and eventually settles on the word עברי — which also happens to be the Hebrew word for Hebrew!

Both Kukla and Wenig make the point that the experience of crossing over into a new and more authentic life is central to both Jewish and transgender experience, and hence that these two identities are not as unrelated or even contradictory as some might assume. In the seemingly radical act of creating a blessing for gender transition, Kukla is merely asserting what those of us who are trans already know in our hearts — that, legal or not, accepted or not, sanctioned or not, the need to cross over is inscribed in the book of our lives, written in letters too deep to be effaced, by a hand greater than our own.

It is that same need — the need to cross over, to be recognized and counted, to come out of the shadows and into the light — that I recognize in the stories of the millions of undocumented immigrants who live among us, who share the same space and contribute to our society in a thousand unacknowledged ways, and who nevertheless are frequently denied even the most basic elements of human dignity. It is in the courage of undocumented youth who, at incredible personal risk, come out of the shadows to protest the injustice of deportations and the denial of legal protection from discrimination and exploitation. It is a need that, like all human needs, is grounded in the lived experience of real people who deserve to be seen and to be heard, not hidden behind a smokescreen of anxiety and misinformation erected by those who would use our fear of a largely imaginary “other” to cement their own power and influence.

Access to space is important — space to live and to grow, to share and to prosper. To be denied that necessary space is to be denied an important part of one’s humanity. This is something I believe all of us know, deep down, although the stories we tell ourselves of danger and scarcity sometimes make us forget that truer, deeper knowledge. As the debate in Congress over comprehensive immigration reform continues, and as we perhaps consider whether and how to add our voices to that debate, may we not lose sight of that fundamental need — and of the ways in which each of us, in our own manner, has been impelled by the circumstances of our lives, or our own nature, or by the mysterious hand of the Divine, to be crossers-over.